First Week in Hamburg: Overwhelmed and Mixed Feelings

My first week in Hamburg comes to a close. It was just a week, but so many things happened that I feel it was a month.

On Monday I begun my first day at Project Breeze. Since I wanted to make a good impression, I arrived at the office at 8:45 am. I was the first one to get there, but then I had to wait for more than an hour because everyone else arrived at 10:00. Joke’s on me I guess. Since then I decided to conform to the status quo and be there 10:00, just like normal people. 🙂

My first week at Project Breeze was more busy than I expected. I had to design about 5-6 different versions for a rollup before one was chosen as the winner. Robert seems to be quite demanding when it comes to design, and that’s not a bad thing when you want to challenge yourself and your design skills.

After my first working day I was exhausted and went home only to realize I still haven’t found a fork to buy, so I had to eat my fish salad using only a knife. I guess it could have been worse: I might have been forced to eat using two sticks. 😉

There was another problem at my dorm. I had already spent the 250 Mb I had from the O2 mobile network, and theoretically I still had internet, but at very slow speed. Slower than a snail watching turtle porn. But I was promised by one of the tutors here at the dorm that I would have internet by Tuesday.

Tuesday we had lunch at and Asian restaurant that Robert was familiar with. But since I had never eaten Vietnamese food before, I ordered the same as Robert. My food looked something like this:

But it tasted sort of like a combination of wet socks and plastic noodles.

Zarko on the other hand had some really really …. REALLY hot sushi:

But enough about food. Back to work, and after the daily work program, a long but interesting brainstorm meeting on UI / UX.

Wednesday morning, me and Zarko from Serbia went to register at an institution whose name I cannot spell, so I will just copy and paste it here: “Einwohnermeldeamt” in Eimsbüttel. Didn’t manage to solve anything, just to obtain a form which we had to complete. We realized we weren’t going to solve much all by ourselves and that we need the help of someone from AIESEC, so we wrote Stefan and he agreed to help us the next day.

In the afternoon, ZDF TV came. ZDF is the national television here in Germany, so it was quite an achievement that they wanted to interview Robert about Project Breeze. Below you can see them in the background, with cameras and microphones, while in the foreground there’s Zarko and my laptop screen:

Thursday we finally managed to get registered as interns working in Germany, thanks to Stefan who was very kind and although not having any sleep the previous night, took us to where we had to register, and then made appointments for us at the bank to get bank accounts next week. I even visited the AIESEC office in Hamburg and took some pictures for you:

Quite a typical AIESEC office, wouldn’t you agree?

After a hard working day at the office the same day, I decided to stay for longer (since I still didn’t have internet back at the dorm) and I showed Robert and Sasha some clips about Romania. We even shared music videos from each other countries, so that I would say was a great leap forward into getting to know each other better. But I still didn’t feel that the coconut was broken just yet. (I’ll explain what I mean in one of my future posts 😉 )

On Friday we had lunch together again, this time together with Annika as well. I had a Turkish Doner Durum, or “shaworma” as it is called back in Romania. It wasn’t bad at all, although not very typical to Hamburg, I would say. The rest of the day was quite hectic, especially the last 30 minutes, when I had to design 2 different “front and back”-printed flyers in a matter of minutes. I do have some design skills, but unfortunately the deadline was too short for me to come up with something visually pleasing, so the task was postponed to the next week.

Big surprise when I arrived back at the dorm: I have internet!!! Yuppiii! 😀

On Saturday I went to IKEA to buy some dishes and a goddamn fork. To my surprise, most of the porcelain plates in IKEA were actually made in Romania:

Today (Sunday) I decided it was time to actually visit Hamburg. And a good place to start were the surroundings near my dorm. First I set upon visiting the big park near Ohlsdorf, which turned out to be a huge cemetery which even had bus stops within it! After that I visited the actual park behind my dorm and decided that was my new relaxation spot. Uhm… when it’s not raining in Hamburg (which is quite rare).

I’ll just leave you now with some pictures I took today in the cemetery and park:

As I promised, I wrote more about what happened during the week, but I am probably going to change the format until I reach a desired one. If you have any comments or feedback / suggestions, do let me know in the comments below. Until next time: Tschüss! (it means “Bye” and it’s quite a common greeting here). 🙂